What’s new for your business from inriver? Summary: Jan 2024

During the month of January 2024, inriver made a number of releases that enhanced the functionality, user experience and performance of our PIM, as well as fixing some known bugs. Here are some highlights of how these releases may benefit your business:

User Experience

There have been a number of enhancements to the inriver PIM user experience during January. These include improved pagination when a search returns more than 100 results, and the ability to create new entities from within the Dashboard without navigating to the Enrich tab.

There are also updates to the user interface for Control Center. A new set of shortcuts improves navigation for admin users of the inriver PIM and there’s a new drop-down which makes it easier to switch between different environments, for example if a user has access to both a Test and Production environment.

We’ve also fixed an issue which caused some previews to be displayed incorrectly in Syndicate and another that would sometimes prevent images from displaying correctly in the inriver PIM portal.

We’ve also made some changes to help customers that work with the data sets that are suited to their business. At one end of the scale, we have eliminated a bug that caused errors when working with very small decimal numbers. On the opposite side, Control Center is now able to more gracefully handle very long names for entities, customers and environments.

Performance

The January releases have also included several changes that will improve performance within your PIM. For example, it’s now possible to disable “link rules” from running. A link rule is a really useful process that can be configured to automatically link entities together and populate channels or publications, so you don’t have to do that work manually. But there are some conditions (for example in a channel that is not yet live, or an entity that’s not part of a channel) where these processes aren’t needed and would just be using up processing power with no value to your business. Now, you’re now able to disable these rules from running (either with a manual toggle or via our REST API) on a case-by-case basis to improve overall performance.

At the same time, we’ve fixed a number of bugs that caused the PIM portal to return error messages or become unresponsive under certain error conditions. And we’ve optimized it to allow users to view and edit much larger volumes of text in the form of a “locale string” without impacting performance.

Inspire

We continue to make enhancements to inriver Inspire, the AI-powered capability that enables our customers to automatically generate useful product content from their structured PIM data, such as descriptions, headlines, and SEO keywords.

As you may know, we added some exciting new features within Inspire last September including:

• Enhance – Now, as well as generating new text with Inspire, users can also instruct Inspire to enhance existing text from within your PIM, selecting from a range of options including:
  • Improve writing
  • Fix Spelling and Grammar
  • Extend the text
  • Simplify the text
  • Change the tone
• Chat - Now, as well as selecting from pre-prepared prompts to generate text, users can interact with the AI in a chat-like interface where they can make custom requests such as “rewrite the text to make it more conversational and add emojis” or “keep that text but increase the focus on the product’s sustainability.”

In our latest releases we’ve made some important adjustments to the user experience when working with both these features, providing a cleaner and more intuitive user interface for more efficient and effective content enrichment workflows.

We’ve also made some updates to the way Inspire supports translation into alternative languages. Now, when giving the AI a translation task, Inspire will supply the AI with content from the source PIM fields in the target language (where possible), as well as existing text from any linked entities. This should ensure a higher quality translation for your business. For example, if you’ve got category headings within your PIM that you’ve created in German using a human translator to ensure they really resonate with the German market, Inspire will provide those to the AI as context for the current field that is being translated into German. This should mean you get a better quality of translation that is more in keeping with your existing approved content.

Further new features were released this month to the select band of customers and partners in our Inspire BETA program. If you’re interested in joining that programme and becoming one of our AI pioneers, please contact our Inspire Feature Manager, viktor.bergqvist@inriver.com for details.

For Developers: Extensions & Controlled Vocabulary Lists

In addition to a range of REST API updates that will enable developers to get responses and status updates from the various inriver Extensions, our updates to Control Center mean it’s now also easier to see which extensions are enabled in a particular environment. At the same time, we’ve added a description field that offers a handy reminder of what each extension does within your PIM environment.

We’ve also made a number of bug fixes to make it easier for our customers to work with Controlled Vocabulary Lists (CVLs).

That’s it for this summary. If you’d like to know more about the detail behind these enhancements, you can read our technical release notes at any time.